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TidBITS

The oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet, TidBITS brings you the Apple Macintosh, iPhone, iPad, and iPod news, reviews, tips, and commentary that matters. Join us each week for audio versions of award-winning coverage from industry stalwarts Adam Engst, Glenn Fleishman, Julio Ojeda-Zapata, Michael Cohen, Rich Mogull, Jeff Carlson, Tonya Engst, and others.

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What Happened to Dave Barry?

TidBITS ·

2025/07/21

Who among us has not Googled themselves to see how we’re represented online? When humor columnist Dave Barry did that recently, he was presented with one of Google’s “People also ask” questions: “What happened to Dave Barry?” Curious, he clicked it and went down a maze of twisty little AI answers, all different and many inaccurate. In the first, he had passed away from cancer, but in later answers, it became clear that he was being confused with another Dave Barry from Dorchester, MA. Barry’s Death

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Lessons from 14 Years at a Standing Desk

TidBITS ·

2025/07/21

After seeing the photo of my new 14-inch MacBook Pro and Apple Studio Displays in “Switching from a 27-inch iMac to a 14-inch MacBook Pro: A Fresh Start” (30 June 2025), TidBITS reader David Price expressed curiosity about my standing desk. Although the standing desk is a significant part of my work life and a topic we’ve covered in the past, I’ve said very little about my setup. How I Came to Work at a Standing Desk I couldn’t remember precisely when I reconfigured my desk from a sitting to a

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Microsoft Office for Mac 16.99

TidBITS ·

2025/07/21

Microsoft has released version 16.99 of Office for Mac, bringing a range of Copilot AI enhancements to the productivity suite. Copilot in Excel can now intelligently infer relevant table or data range based on a query (highlighting inferred data for clarity) and displays value tokens (i.e., visual indicators around cell values) when a cell contains a data type or other rich format. In PowerPoint, Copilot can now create a slide from a file or prompt, as well as access enterprise assets hosted in a

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BBEdit 15.5.2

TidBITS ·

2025/07/21

Bare Bones Software has released BBEdit 15.5.2, a maintenance update for the venerable text editor. The update fixes a bug where “Match using pattern” for Process Duplicates did not work as intended, resolves a crash that would occur when switching appearances, addresses misbehavior when using the Quit command from the Dock menu, fixes a bug in which certain uses of character classes in a grep pattern would fail to match during a multi-file search, adds some additional content types to

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Seagate Ships 30 TB Hard Drives for $600

TidBITS ·

2025/07/16

In a press release that scores high on the buzzword count, Seagate writes:Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX), a global leader in mass-capacity data storage, today announced the global channel availability of up to 30TB Exos ®M and IronWolf® Pro hard drives. Built on Seagate’s Mozaic3+ platform and powered by heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, these drives are engineered to meet increasing demand for scalable, high-performance storage driven by the rise of AI deployments

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DEVONthink 4.0.2

TidBITS ·

2025/07/14

DEVONtechnologies has issued DEVONthink 4.0.2, a maintenance release that follows the recent major upgrade (see “DEVONthink 4.0.1,” 30 June 2025). The document and information manager now improves support for image links with relative URLs containing spaces in Markdown documents, displays custom colored groups in color in more places within the user interface, better detects the language of documents, and fixes a bug that caused toolbar searches using the size: search prefix to fail if they

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Marcin Wichary’s Frame of Preference Explores 20...

TidBITS ·

2025/07/14

At his Aresluna website, designer Marcin Wichary explores the evolution of Mac settings in Frame of Preference, an interactive journey through two decades of control panels: As a designer, I’m meant to dislike settings. As a user, I love them. Every year I celebrate Settings Day: a day when I take a look at the options and toggles in all the apps I use. I do this out of curiosity – what was added since the last time I looked? – but also because I love this way of getting to know software: peeking

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Audio Hijack 4.5.2

TidBITS ·

2025/07/14

Rogue Amoeba has issued Audio Hijack 4.5.2, adding support for the Zoho Meeting desktop app as a VoIP audio source. The release also corrects visual issues with the global window in the beta version of macOS 26 Tahoe, ensures that editing a file name in the recording inspector works as expected, improves recording to MP3 in Variable Bitrate, improves VoiceOver labels on the Broadcast and Live Stream blocks, and no longer attempts to load audio plugins before the iLok licensing daemon is fully

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1Password 8.11.1

TidBITS ·

2025/07/14

1Password released 1Password 8.11 with a smattering of bug fixes and improvements for the password manager. The update improves the readability of the message seen when encountering an unrecoverable error, fixes an issue for family organizers and administrators where the Shared vault could appear twice in the list of vaults, resolves an issue that could prevent you from viewing documents that didn’t upload correctly, and fixes a bug where search results would show missing lines in an item. A quick

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How to Keep the User Library Folder Visible in macOS

TidBITS ·

2025/07/14

When drafting “Switching from a 27-inch iMac to a 14-inch MacBook Pro: A Fresh Start” (30 June 2025), I wrote: The two configuration tweaks that required a bit more effort were displaying the Library folder in the Finder’s Go menu so I didn’t have to press Option to see it each time (see “Dealing with Lion’s Hidden Library,” 20 July 2011) and getting proxy icons to appear all the time (see “TipBITS: Always Show Window Proxy Icons,” 26 March 2022). The command line instructions in my 2011 article

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Do You Use It? Revisiting Websites with Windows,...

TidBITS ·

2025/07/11

Reading the responses to last week’s Do You Use It? poll about browser tab management caused me to think a lot harder about why tabs exist at all, the motivation behind the development of pinned tabs, and how pinned tabs vary so much between Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Arc.Overall, I wasn’t surprised by the results, which show that about half of TidBITS readers don’t experience tab overload at all, with only 1–10 tabs open because they always close tabs as soon as they’re done. However, the other

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The Origin of the Crayon Color Picker

TidBITS ·

2025/07/11

Developer John Calhoun tells the story of working on the Mac color picker in the mid-1990s, including how he independently added the crayon color picker without any oversight from design or marketing. It was frankly a thing I liked about working for Apple in those days. The engineers were the ones driving the ship. As I said, I wrote an HSV picker because it was, I thought, a more intuitive color space for artists. I wrote the HTML color picker because of the advent of the web. And I wrote the

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MyMac Publisher Tim Robertson Dies at Age 55

TidBITS ·

2025/07/08

[I appreciate longtime MyMac contributor John “Nemo” Nemerovski volunteering to commemorate this sad event—his last byline here dates all the way back to 1997. I met Tim only a few times at Macworld Expo, but he was a familiar name in the Apple media ecosystem. –Adam] It is with a heavy heart that I must share the news that Tim Robertson has died after a recent illness. Tim was a foundational online Mac and Apple content creator, getting his start with MyMac Magazine as a standalone DocMaker

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Cloudflare’s “Pay-Per-Crawl” Points to a New Model...

TidBITS ·

2025/07/07

One of the most significant concerns about the rise of generative AI has been its potential to decouple the relationship between content creators and content consumers. Rather than using a search engine to find original sources of information that might answer our questions, we’re increasingly relying on systems like Google’s AI answers, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude to answer our questions directly. That’s often better for users but poses an existential problem for authors and publishers who rely

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SaneBox Sponsoring TidBITS

TidBITS ·

2025/07/07

We’re pleased to welcome SaneBox as our latest TidBITS sponsor. If your inbox resembles “Inbox 5000” more than “Inbox Zero,” SaneBox might be the solution you need. As Josh Centers wrote in “Regain Control of Your Inbox with SaneBox” (7 November 2022), this add-on service helps reduce email overload by providing powerful custom filtering within your existing email setup. For Josh, SaneBox’s standout feature was SaneBlackHole—simply move a message to this folder, and all past and future messages from

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Pixelmator Pro 3.7

TidBITS ·

2025/07/07

In its first feature update since being acquired by Apple late last year (see “Apple Acquires Pixelmator, Speculation Begins,” 1 November 2024), Pixelmator Pro 3.7 adds support for Apple Intelligence to the image editing app. You can now use Image Playground to create original images based on a photo, a description, or people from your Photos library, as well as recreate image layers or drawings in artistic styles. With Writing Tools support, you can proofread, summarize, rewrite, and modify the

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Mellel 6.4

TidBITS ·

2025/07/07

Mellel has issued version 6.4 of its eponymous word processor with enhancements to several citation and bibliography features. The new version enables you to have a single bibliography for the entire document, a bibliography for each chapter, or both. It also allows you to sort the citation list alphabetically or by order of appearance, ensures bibliography styles and fonts match better with the document’s styles and fonts, increases the choice of delimiters to the Convert Text to Citations

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Mactracker 8.0.1

TidBITS ·

2025/07/07

Ian Page has released Mactracker 8.0, introducing a beta feature for syncing your My Models between Macs using iCloud Drive. The update provides detailed information about recent Apple hardware and operating system releases, including the Mac Studio, MacBook Air, and iPad Air. Mactracker 8 also adds color swatches to all models (where available), adds the capability to archive entries in My Models, includes external display support info for the latest iPad models, resolves an issue where incorrect

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Fantastical 4.0.16 and Cardhop 2.3.7

TidBITS ·

2025/07/07

Flexibits has released Fantastical 4.0.16, allowing ignored invitations to sync across devices. The calendar app adds support for custom weekly repeating tasks with Todoist, updates invitee auto-complete to prioritize contacts that you have previously invited, improves the reliability of initial syncs for Microsoft 365 accounts, fixes the process of setting an event to repeat on the last day of the month, resolves an issue with adding Google Meet calls to a single event in a repeating series, fixes

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Do You Use It? Browser Tab Management

TidBITS ·

2025/07/03

Tab overload in traditional Web browsers prompted many people to try Arc, The Browser Company’s innovative browser that completely rethinks how tabs work (see “Arc Will Change the Way You Work on the Web,” 1 May 2023):Arc positions tabs in a left-hand sidebar, which enables users with more than a handful of open tabs to read their names. Other browsers are increasingly following suit; see “A Roundup of Vertical Tab Support in Mac Web Browsers” (5 June 2023). Arc replaces bookmarks with a unique

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